Meet Your Neighbor: Koenigs help raise support for foster families

FREMONT - This summer, members of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Clyde purchased school supplies and new school clothes for a local girl who is living with her custodial grandmother, and also helped the grandmother with much-needed car repairs.

The family and the church met through a new program called Children’s Keeper that connects local foster or kinship families with churches or civic organizations that can offer physical, emotional, and financial support.

Children’s Keeper was the brainchild of Nate Koenig, a Resource Home Specialist with Sandusky Job and Family Services. Through his work recruiting foster and adoptive parents, Koenig discovered a deep need for added support for foster or kinship caregivers — people such as grandparents, aunts, or siblings who take in young relatives whose parents are unable to care for them.

Through Children’s Keeper, Koenig matches church members with kinship or foster families so the church members can develop a relationship with the family and provide support where needed. That help may include the purchase of diapers, clothes, entertainment gift cards or holiday presents and may progress to more personal help such as babysitting or transportation. In some circumstances, church members help teach life skills to foster children aging out of the system or offer support to birth parents working through addiction recovery.

Faith United Methodist Church and Trinity United Methodist Church in Gibsonburg have also joined the Children’s Keeper program since it was instituted in May, and Fremont Alliance and Journey Church, both in Fremont, will start in the fall. Koenig is visiting local churches to recruit more help.

Koenig said there are two primary benefits to the Children’s Keeper program — obtaining support for kinship and foster families and keeping the foster/adoption issue in the forefront of the church’s life.

“It dawned on me that I could talk to churches about adoption and foster care on Sunday, and they can forget about it by Wednesday,” he said. “This keeps the issue of foster and adoption with them all year round.”

That is vitally important, as the need for foster and adoption families has skyrocketed in the county due to the opiate epidemic.  The number of children in county custody has doubled over the past five years, and the number of children in permanent custody has exploded. The county took permanent custody of three children between 2011 and 2013. Between 2014 and 2016, that number rose to 25. This year, the county has 50 children in custody and has taken permanent custody of 13 since Jan. 1.

The opiate epidemic has not only affected numbers within the agency, but it has redefined what a case looks like. Five years ago, there was a good chance at reunification, but that possibility has weakened.

“Many parents are not able to get off drugs, at least not in time to get their kids back, and sometimes kids are abandoned by their parents,” Koenig said.

Added to that burden is the fact that there are currently only nine approved foster homes in Sandusky County. Children who can’t be placed in foster homes locally are sent to foster homes outside the county or to for-profit foster agencies, sometimes as far as four hours away.

Koenig has not only a professional interest in foster and adoptive parenting but also a personal one. He and his wife, Jenny, have an adoptive daughter, a soon-to-be adopted son, and a foster son. The couple became interested in fostering after learning through adoption classes that foster care can make a lasting difference in a child’s life.

“Even if it’s only a month or two, we may be the only stability a kid gets his whole childhood,” Koenig said.

For more information on foster care, adoption, or the Children’s Keeper program, contact Nate Koenig at 419-334-8708, ext. 5260 or visit the Job and Family Services tent at the Sandusky County Fair.

Contact correspondent Sheri Trusty at sheritrusty4@gmail.com.